It is easy to interpret a story through reference to something outside of itself (say, a political or social event), but far more difficult to analyse it through an exploration of its particular mode of being, its possibility and promise—indeed its poetics. Literary critics are a sad lot; not only is their work necessarily derivative and posterior to creation, it must also formulate its criteria of success and failure from the fictional work under consideration. Few Urdu critics have tried to delve deeper into the elusive poetics of Manto’s creative world. Instead, most have attempted to analyse his stories by recourse to criteria that are organically at odds with the nature of fiction. Political events are not the measure of the success or failure of a work of art, but rather, whether or how well the work has lived up to its latent promise.
Manto may well have written ‘Toba Tek Singh’ following his brief stint in an asylum. Though doubtful, he may even have intended it to be read as ‘a scathing indictment’ of Partition. (I rather think Manto was quite taken with the character he had created and wanted to follow along with him on his existential odyssey, ready to be surprised by his every reality-defying move.) But should we read it as such? After all, paraphrasing Kundera, it is not the business of fiction to write the history of a society; it is very much its business to write the history of the individual. That Stalinism is criminal is evident to everyone, he says in ‘The Making of a Writer’, you do not have to yell it in the form of the novel. And judgement (‘indictment’) has no place in his calling. At day’s end, what remains looming on the horizon is the larger-than-life image of the protagonist, Partition having shrunk back into the distance. In a paradoxical way, it is Bishan Singh who retroactively makes history meaningful, indeed inevitable, with an insight that quite escapes the historical narratives of the apocalyptic event, and not the other way around. History merely provides the occasion to discover some hitherto unknown aspect of human existence, some truth about the character. That is, precisely, what fiction does.
As for explaining away the work of a writer by relating it back to his biography, characters are seldom the mirror-image of the writer’s persona. Even when they appear to bear strong resemblance to certain individuals around us, they remain entirely composite—something Manto has expressed himself:
Literature isn’t a portrayal of an individual’s own life. When a person sets out to write, he doesn’t record the daily account of his domestic affairs, nor does he mention his personal joys and sorrows, or his illness and health. It’s entirely likely that the tears in his pen-portraits belong to his afflicted sister; the smiles come from you, and the laughter from some down-and-out manual worker. To weigh them against one’s own tears, smiles and laughter is a grievous error. Every creative piece seeks to convey a particular mood, a particular effect and a specific purpose. If that mood, effect and purpose remain unappreciated, the piece will be nothing more than a lifeless object.*
If Sahae, Mozel, Babu Gopinath, Toba Tek Singh, Radha, Janki or Saugandhi impinge upon our consciousness with indomitable force, it is precisely because, in the balance of his major works, Manto saw none of them as a typical representative of their social or religious group or as one shaped by its determinants. (Was Mozel a representative of the Jewish community of Bombay and her character shaped by its values?) More often, he saw each one in deathly opposition to the certainty of inherited values. Which, at any rate, is the business of fiction. If his characters behave contrary to conventional logic, it is because they act in consonance with fictional logic and ‘a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’. Only in the hospitality of fictional spaces can polarities coexist without one trying to eliminate the other. Manto’s genius lay in recognizing these characters as discrete entities, and history, or social and religious determinants, as merely the backdrop against which each of them, in his or her own eccentric way, stumbled through their particular existential trek.
To read ‘Mozel’ as a story about Partition would be to ignore the simultaneous presence of the many contradictory forces and paradoxes in her complex personality. Partition did not give birth to Mozel or shape her behaviour; it only furnished Manto with the occasion to explore and subsequently reveal a truth about the eponymous character. Any traumatic event would have worked just as easily for such exploration and activated her inherent tendencies that only surface, unexpectedly, towards the end of the story.
Manto knew too well that most humans live and breathe in the obscuring haze of contradictory impulses and that certainties—the arbiter of human behaviour so predisposed to doling out reward and punishment—are the prerogative only of ideologues, whether religious or political. Fiction can ill afford certainties, and judgement on their basis even less. Take, for instance, Sahae: ‘A staunch Hindu, who worked the most abominable profession, and yet his soul—it couldn’t have been more radiant.’* He was a pimp in Bombay who ran a brothel and dreamed of making thirty thousand rupees so that he could return to his native Benares and open a fabric shop. Religious devoutness here exists in perfect symbiosis with the demands of a ‘filthy’ profession. It is a meeting of opposites. In real life, a devout man would not come anywhere near a whorehouse, much less run it, though in the same life most people would display an amazing motley of contradictory impulses. Sahae will remain forever suspect to conventional morality. We may side with this morality but we cannot deny his behaviour as a possibility of being, even if it exists only in the liminal spaces of the imagination, even if we only admit to its nebulous existence grudgingly.
Can one call Esther’s transformation towards the end of Sándor Márai’s novel Esther’s Inheritance† even remotely logical? Robbed and duped by the same swindler, ‘that piece of garbage’, all her life, she is still willing to sign her last possession over to Lajos. She does not believe a word of what he is saying, yet she finds that his statement—‘there is a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’ (p. 143)—contains a substantial core of truth. In the real world, even if this ambiguous truth does not change anything, its potential existence cannot be barred from our consciousness. Many of Manto’s characters, too, display such logical but entirely human contradictions.
Life is not the Straight Path leading to heaven for a writer. It is, rather, a trek riddled with potholes and detours and mind-boggling surprises, leading eventually to an infinite, mirror-encrusted maze of giddying, colliding images. The coffin has been lowered into the freshly dug grave for burial, the mourners stand around in a semicircle, the priest is only halfway through intoning his eulogy for the dearly departed when a ‘neurotic gust of wind’ lifts the hat off Papa Clevis’s head and drops it at the edge of the grave. Eventually it will tumble into the grave, but for now Clevis, hesitating between should he or shouldn’t he pick it up, lets his gaze crawl along the erratic course of the bobbing hat. The attention of everyone in the small band of mourners has wavered. No one is listening to the eulogy any more; instead their eyes are riveted on the comic drama unfolding before them. The funeral loses its gravitas and laughter is born.*
Such utter disregard for decorum, such hilarity in the most solemn moment of grief and loss—only a writer can think of such contrary situations because he is not beholden to the rules of conventional decorum. He cannot be tamed by the tyranny of conventional behaviour or some social, political or jingoistic agenda. Literature, as Manto says, is
an ornament, and just as pretty jewelry isn’t always unalloyed gold, neither is a beautiful piece of writing pure reality. To rub it over and over again on the touchstone like a nugget of gold is the height of tastelessness . . . [It] is either literature or it is the worst kind of offense . . . an outrageous monstrosity.†
And to those who censured him for immorality and obscenity, instead of delving into the tortuous by-lanes of his art, his unequivocal answer would be: ‘By all means, call me names. I don’t find that offensive—swearing isn’t unnatural—but at least do it with finesse so your mouth doesn’t begin to stink and my sense of
decency isn’t injured.’‡
Lamentably, too often Manto has been drafted into the service of one social or political issue or another. The greater part of the critical commentary on his writing has mainly focused on prostitutes (a social phenomenon) and Partition (a political event).
Of course the remnants of the Progressives and a fair bunch of those too eager to deny fiction its radical autonomy would likely rush to declare—teary-eyed, I might add—‘Hatak’ (Spurned) as yet another story about the debasement of women. They would go for the nearest truncheon, in the absence of a cleaver, to bash the head of a society intent on sending its womenfolk to eke out a living by selling their charms and the physical repository of those charms. They would not fail to stick a feather in Manto’s cap for exposing this crass injustice, the sordid underbelly of society. And they would also dig up a motive for his doing this: infinite compassion for the downtrodden, disenfranchised female of the South Asian subcontinent.
To speculate on why a woman chooses to sell her body is the business of sociologists, to judge the morality of such a choice is the business of the custodians of morality. Is it also the business of fiction? Was it Manto’s business? No, the business of fiction is to see what she makes of this life, independently of the circumstances that brought her to this choice.
In his non-fictional piece ‘‘Iṣmat-Farōshī’,* (selling of virtue: prostitution)—an impassioned defence of women who practise the world’s oldest profession—Manto goes into great detail arguing vigorously for prostitution’s similarity to every other profession, and hence, deserving of respect. We do not look down on a typist, or even a sweeper woman, why should we ride roughshod over a bawd? All three do what they do in order to earn a living. In other words, a prostitute does not forfeit her right to be an individual by the choice of her profession. We must go past her profession to see her human possibility.
In ‘Spurned’, Manto leaves the protagonist’s reasons for selling her flesh entirely opaque, or rather, creatively vague, as any good writer would. He is not interested in telling us why she opted to become a fille de joie. Was it a forced or bad marriage? Had her husband ditched her and, thus disgraced, she could not return to her parental home? Was she abducted and raped? (This is precisely what happened to many Hindu women during Partition. Many interviews with such women in Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India attest to the fact that, after being repatriated to India, these women chose to live and die in an ashram rather than return to their ancestral homes and bring ill-repute to their families.) Or was it domestic abuse or sexual violence? Dire poverty? What? In a devilish vein, one might also posit that she turned tricks simply because she loved sex, though this possibility should quickly be ruled out because the story does not offer any compelling grounds for such an assumption. In fact, Saugandhi’s ‘mind considered sexual intimacy patently absurd’, and yet ‘Every limb of her body yearned to be worked over, to exhaustion, until fatigue had settled in and eased her into a state of delightful sleep.’ No, Manto does not give us a clue. He refrains because it is not important for him or for us to know. On the other hand, he forecloses any possibility of our being tempted, or being rash enough, to ask by deftly slipping a tiny detail into the narrative: ‘Of course, she didn’t look quite as fresh and vibrant as she did five years ago when she lived with her parents, unencumbered by any cares whatsoever.’
So there was a time, not so long ago, when Saugandhi lived a carefree life with her parents. Between that time and selling her body in a seamy neighbourhood of Bombay there lies a dark abyss into which Manto does not delve, nor does he invite us to look. Whatever happened in the intervening period is anyone’s guess, but any reason that might be suggested will have absolutely no bearing on the story or its protagonist. Manto, rather, wants us to know what happened this particular night when she was spurned and rejected by a pot-bellied seth who came along in his fancy car, pointed the beam of his flashlight at her, and sounded his disapproval with a cryptic ‘Oh no!’ Manto wants us to know how she dealt with this gut-wrenching denial of her being, this denial of who she was, by initiating a veritable ontology of selfhood.
A man feels the need for a woman, runs to the nearest brothel and finds himself one. End of story. Manto would not be doing that, would he? And if he were, what is the point of the story. No, he wants to deal with Saugandhi as a woman, yes, a woman very much her own, not simply some type that can be enlisted for a dramatic dressing down of society. What society is like is for us to decide, independently of whether it has any critical role to play in the story at hand. Manto wants to deal with Saugandhi as an individual—a fille de nuit, yes, but unlike any of her sisters in the profession. In her unexpected reaction lies the falsity of any overt or covert notion of an agenda to take society to task.
As it is, the greater number of Manto prostitutes really do not behave as one might expect them to. In the end, they vehemently resist categorization into a particular type. Many if not all—such as Siraj and Shakuntala—jealously guard their virginity by not letting any ‘passengers’ (Manto’s favourite word for a prostitute’s client) ride their train. And they all seem to crave love and suffer from its absence in their desolate lives. Siraj had willingly eloped with her lover, who ran away during the night leaving her asleep in the hotel. This clouded her entire existence. Only after she had exacted her vengeance—turning the tables on her fickle lover by spending a whole night with him and then abandoning him in like manner, throwing her burqa over him while he slept at that—could she recover. Society plays little, if any, part in this drama, or in the story ‘Shārdā.’ Sharda gives herself physically to Nazir in a manner he had never experienced before, but she is unwilling to enter the profession or allow her sister to enter it. When she leaves Nazir, who does not believe in love, she does so with a dignity few ‘respectable’ women could rival. Zeenat, the Kashmiri kabutri in ‘Babu Gopinath’, eventually settles down with the respectable Hyderabadi landowner Ghulam Ali. And Kanta opens the door for her pimp Khushia while she is stark naked. Khushia does not like this show of immodesty. ‘You could have let me know you were bathing. I would have come back another time.’ She smiles and throws every ounce of his male pride into a tumultuous vortex with her answer, ‘When you said it was Khushia, I thought, “What’s the harm. It’s just our Khushia. Let him come in.”’
And Navab of ‘Behind the Reeds’, as the narrator tells us, ‘wasn’t averse to her profession’. When her mother, or ‘whoever she was’, introduces her to her first man, the terribly simple and naive girl thinks that this is how young women ‘were initiated into their youth’. She gets ‘accustomed to her prostitute’s existence’ and believes that her life’s ultimate purpose lay in sleeping with men, and she quite liked the expensive silks and jewellery they brought as gifts. There is no trace of regret in her acceptance of this life. But ‘she was every bit an indecent young woman—which is how our noble and chaste ladies are wont to look upon her and her ilk—but truth be told, she didn’t realize even for a moment that she was living a life of sin’.
If we look at these women as individuals, all the talk about society’s role in reducing them to a life of ignominy and want loses much of its force. Manto doesn’t use ‘Spurned’ as an occasion to spill his guts against society’s treatment of ‘fallen’ women. (Nor do these women themselves indulge in this exercise.) He is far removed from handing out judgements. In fact, he would not even use the word ‘fallen’ to describe these women because of its judgemental overtones. Rather, he is using the story as an occasion to discover some truth about the person that Saugandhi is. And in doing so, he shrewdly guards his role as a narrator, never once surrendering his neutrality and objectivity. This is in contrast to a story such as ‘Nannhī ki Nānī’ (Tiny’s Granny), where Ismat Chughtai has smothered the individuality of the granny and turned her into a veritable mouthpiece for the author to vent her righteous anger against society. Manto never allows his narrator to trans
form into an interventionist, not even when the narrator bears his own name, which happens quite often in his stories. At several points in the short story ‘Sirāj’, Manto purposely alerts us to the fact that as a writer-narrator he has no right to inject his own reactions and thoughts into the story. For instance, ‘This was more than enough detail for me. How I reacted to it is my concern, not something I should tell you, not as a short story writer anyway.’ And, I would rather not talk about the backstory my mind had woven for Siraj, […].’ What lingers in our minds after we are done reading ‘Shārdā’ is her immense grace and dignity, not how good she was at sex, but her love for Nazir. Giving herself so tenderly, so fully was a consequence of that love, not the result of some pathology of eroticism or promiscuity.
It is about time that we discarded the myth about Manto tacitly following some Progressive–Socialist–Reformist agenda in his fiction; if anything, he was following his own agenda as a writer true to his calling.
I believe it should be evident by now that at the time of writing, a writer’s loyalty rests only with himself and his work, not with his society, country and his nation, which is not to deny his role as a citizen. Long ago Muhammad Hasan Askari, perhaps the single most perceptive early critic of Manto, had underscored this role in his article ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’* by graphically setting it apart from Manto’s role as a writer. He gives the example of some French writers who had, during the tumultuous period of the Second World War, started to produce a series of underground books with the title Les Éditions de Minuit. They were given a major literary award after France became free but declined to accept it. Everything they had written, they said, was simply to serve the nation. It was not literature, nor had they written it as literature.
My Name Is Radha Page 2